In 2004
Belgian artist Wim Delvoye inaugurated Art Farm (艺术农场) a biological art
project where pigs were tattooed in a farming village on the outskirts
of Beijing, China. At the beginning of the project’s
development Delvoye claimed that the pigs would be saved from the
slaughterhouse to become living art. But by the end of 2005, the pigs
were slaughtered and transformed into art objects, their skins and
bodies exhibited and sold in prestigious contemporary art
institutions.

Highlighting behind the scenes footage filmed by Cheto Castellano and
Lissette Olivares between 2004 and 2005 this documentary revisits Art
Farm with a critical lens. Cheto Castellano becomes the film’s primary
interlocutor, providing an emotive critique of Art Farm’s failures and
its production of a colonial gaze, while implicitly critiquing the
white privilege and neoliberal commodification present within the
art-culture system. Editor & Co-Director Roberto Meza affectively
organizes this archive of primary footage to uncover Art Farm’s social
life, concentrating on the relationships built amongst pigs and workers
while raising important questions about multispecies ethics and the
consequences of treating pigs as commodities in the contemporary art
market. This film is dedicated to the pigs who worked and died on
Art Farm.